Question 3: Do you think work like that of photographers Sally Mann, Jock Sturges and/or David Hamilton is positive, innocuous or pernicious in its effect on the viewer? Do you think the photos were intended to be sexual or is this perception something our oversexed culture brings to them? (Please feel free to incorporate your reaction to Noelle Oxenhandler's essay, "Nole Me Tangere," in your answer.) |
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One of my favorite Sally Mann photos is called The Alligator's Approach. In it, a naked three- or four-year-old, draped loosely in a blanket, dozes on a deck above a muddy river. 
Her face is lax, her mouth ajar, her pale body languid. Onto the
bank below, a small alligator crawls.
Looking more closely, one sees that the alligator is not real. It is a plastic float, its teeth and claws printed on. The mist off the river obscures its cartoonish shape, makes it look mobile, and fierce. What is the alligator? A pedophile with the child's fragrant scent in his nostrils? A Hollywood mogul concocting the commercial sex that will invade her fantasies? Adolescence? AIDS? Sexuality itself? All, or none, of the above? It is precisely this ambiguity, this mystery, that makes Mann's pictures so emotionally lush, and -- to me -- so sexy. For, as Jim suggests, she leaves space for viewers to fill with their own fears and desires. (I find Jock Sturges' pictures, by contrast, sanitized and null, perhaps because he selects those tall, blond, thin Californians, who, even naked, read more as advertisements for clean, dutiful American consumerism -- Ralph Lauren bed linens, Sears washing machines, the Pritikin Diet -- than as anything remotely transgressive.) There is peril inevitable in childhood, and adults' greatest pain may be the impotence to prevent all of it. Mann's pictures evoke this feeling powerfully, as Noelle Oxenhandler's piece attests. Mann insists her pictures are not intended to be sexual. Yet she disquiets viewers by representing the shapes of their sexual (and other) anxieties, by declining to provide "correct" interpretations (if that were even possible) of the child's body and the pains and pleasures it encounters in the indifferent world, and by refusing us comforting disclaimers that the alligator is only a mass-produced bag of air masquerading as danger. We are still left with our own fantasies. |
Question 1 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose Naomi Wolf Question 2 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose Naomi Wolf Question 3 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose Sally Mann Question 4 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose |
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